Konrad's von W & uuml;rzburg Trojan War uses the example of the > Achilles on Scyros <-episode to address a complex play with gender identity and performance. At the centre of the literary analysis are the moments of physical liminality inspired by the medical knowledge of the time and the performative acts of gender transformation of the protagonist. Taking into account the societal and medical discourses on gender at the time, but also considering modern theories on the performativity of gender, the aim is to show how the text narrates the moment of > becoming < a woman or a man, what role physical aspects in particular play in this process and how identity crises are triggered that both confirm and subvert the norms of gender roles. The article aims to show how gender identities can be narrated as fluid categories that are shaped by education, the characters' decisions and the biological discourses of the time.
For many years, if not decades, there has been ongoing criticism that texts about (contemporary) art are often incomprehensible. Their language is criticised as devoid of content or artificial. Although researchers have hinted at this problem repeatedly, a systematic (linguistic) analysis of the argumentation patterns & raquo;Topoi & laquo; remains a desideratum. This article aims at giving an overview of the current allegations by systematically looking at approximately 150 texts (and 70 memes) that criticise so-called & raquo;artspeak & laquo;. By adapting the method of argumentation analysis as established by Wengeler, R & ouml;mer and others, six thematically relevant patterns were identified, e.g. the allegations, that & raquo;artspeak & laquo; is made deliberately incomprehensible to promote the speaker's/writer's own prestige or that this specific type of writing is used to sacralise and auratise art. This method not only allows to point out frequently used patterns in argumentation and in readers' expectations, but also indicates prominent paradigms that are specific to art discourse. Furthermore, this approach provides a solid basis for a subsequent analysis of the linguistic patterns responsible for the allegations of (alleged) incomprehensibility.
This paper examines the dynamics between security and progress thinking and their impact on the perception of normality. It is postulated that despite societal changes in the 20th and 21st centuries, a complete dissolution of the boundaries of normality does not occur; rather, an expansion of these boundaries is observed. In crisis contexts, discourse topics shift to fundamental areas of life, with proto-normalist tendencies dominating. A comparative analysis of the years 2018-2019, 2020-2021, and 2022 illustrates how the COVID-19 crisis has shifted discourse topics, causing sociopolitical issues to lose relevance, only to quickly regain significance once normalization occurs.
In this article, we address the question of what is considered 'normal' from a historical linguistic perspective and examine the emergence of the concept of norm within contemporary discourse. The analysis particularly focuses on the concept of norm and its representation in grammars and foreign language textbooks from the 16th and 17th centuries. Through the selection of the two text types under investigation, the dynamics and complexity of the concept of norm can be explored from both the scholarly perspective and the viewpoint of practical language masters as authors of foreign language textbooks. One finding of this study is that what is considered normal is also ambiguous within the grammar writings of the 16th and 17th centuries: While grammarians aim to identify and codify a unified norm, the authors of foreign language textbooks predominantly adopt a usage perspective.
Rocko Schamoni's connected novels Sternstunden der Bedeutungslosigkeit (2007) and Tag der geschlossenen T & uuml;r (2011) are about the (everyday) life of a modern good-for-nothing, for whom the system of the normal not only seems unattainable, but also not desirable. This system revolves around the areas of work, consumption and love and is intertwined with the logic of the cultural construction of two genders. The analysis of the novels intends to show not only that the image of the outsider portrayed in them contains an ambivalent form of masculinity that is held against the semantic field of normality. It further aims at illustrating how the texts aesthetically model the fragility and ambiguity of contemporary constructions of masculinity in order to discuss how these fit into the German discourse of Popliteratur around the new millenium.
This article analyzes the accusation of (hyper-)moralism with regard to its role in opposing the (alleged) denormalization of societal and political discourses. To this end, moralism as an ideology and moralistic communication as a rhetorical practice are discussed. Subsequently, the article examines the characteristics of the (hyper-)moralism accusation and how it is employed as a negative narrative framing to discredit political opponents. In this context, the instrumentalization of specific buzzwords and, in particular, derogatory, even invective terms, which encapsulate the narrative, is also explored. The paper also raises the question of whether the accusation of (hyper-)moralism paradoxically constitutes a form of moralistic communication itself.
Numerous instances of appeals to common sense and normality can currently be observed, especially among far-right and nationalist-conservative politicians in Europe and beyond. In Austria, Germany, France, Italy, the United Kingdom, Canada, and the United States, among other places, far-right politicians are emphasizing common-sense policies and solutions that entail imaginaries of a > new normal < in a post-crisis society. The promised > new normal < is allegedly better equipped to protect its citizens by returning to an imagined past.In this paper I claim that such appeals are necessarily fallacious because they presuppose an allegedly homogenous epistemic community. Accordingly, a novel political logic is being normalized, superseding rational discourse, deliberation, and expert-led policies.
Metaphors can use their semantic recontextualisation potential to comprehensively and persistently put contexts into a new perspective. The at least implicit connection between the metaphorical source and target areas must always be considered. In this respect, metaphorically charged language use reveals itself to be multidimensionally differentiable in terms of discourse semantics. These multidirectional contextual relationships, which can also be understood as a kind of pendulum movement, will be analysed in the context of this article by means of an exemplary analysis of the adoption of three central historical metaphors - Kulturkampf, Diktatur and Holocaust - in food and climate discourses in terms of corpus linguistics and reflected upon in terms of ecolinguistics and discourse ethics. The aim is to understand the productivity of historical metaphors used as a central means of linking and understanding food and climate discourses with reference to controversial topics, such as meat consumption.
The essay develops the thesis that in Dan Brown's Da Vinci Code we are dealing with a peculiar form of medievalism and of the popularization of science in the form of a contemporary thriller. The > secret < of the Grail, which was not allowed to be observed by many or by anyone, is depopularized and decanonized by the Catholic Church. The result is an image of science that serves precisely to re-enchant the world, not to disenchant it. The conspiracy theme in Dan Brown belongs to the narrated world, because on both sides - the conspiracy of Opus Dei from the point of view of the Enlightenment and the conspiracy of the Priory of Sion from the point of view of Catholicism - we are dealing with the narrative staging of > half-truths <, which ensure the inner coherence of the story. Finally further thoughts on the presence of popular knowledge of the Middle Ages in the contemporary novel and literary history are developed.
There exists a persistent myth that the Kemenate was a space reserved exclusively for women. This claim, however, cannot be substantiated from an architectural-historical perspective. From a literary standpoint, this impression is often reinforced by a narrative framing that is frequently overlooked. In courtly literature, the Kemenate is a multifunctional and variable living space accessible to both genders-a place where roles and discourses intersect. This ambivalent space of both protection and fear exhibits many of the characteristics of Michel Foucault's concept of heterotopia. The Kemenate is regularly associated with transformation, identity, secrecy, and betrayal, and is often semantically marked as a liminal, third space.
Extreme situations such as violence and torture represent an existential problem. Physical suffering, in its phenomenology, eludes any representation. If pain cannot be communicated without inflicting it, the literary representation faces a narrative challenge. Jean Amery and Cemile Sahin address this challenge with different literary strategies. This article explores these strategies by relating them to their cultural theoretical background.
As a representation of a state system, the house in the GDR served as a metaphor for the interpretations of socialism, the state, and its society. Particularly tied to the housing program of the early 1970s, the House of Socialism symbolized the promise of a life worth living within the socialism of the GDR. This article examines the concrete realization of social utopias of home in the GDR and their literary reflection by the writing workers of the GDR from the late 1960s to the period of transformation. The article discusses texts on the topic of home and dwelling produced in the Circle of Writing Workers of VEB Carl Zeiss Jena. In these texts changing perceptions and interpretations of life in GDR-socialism are mirrored as well as questions of the relationship between community and separation are being addressed.
Residential architecture spatially and socially situates humans and their everyday practices, thereby assuming the status of a cultural technology of subjectification and socialization. Its vocabulary are cells and halls. Throughout the history of architecture, the fusion of these two types has produced a rich typology of residential buildings and socio-cultural spaces. But housing as we know it today has become a discipline of cellular architecture, whereas halls have been relegated to the societal spheres of work, leisure, and politics, outside the domestic realm. The essay revisits the tradition of the hall in the history of residential architecture and addresses its reappearance in contemporary innovative, experimental housing as a consequence of societal, cultural, and ecological transformation. It argues for a renewal of the cultural imagination of dwelling within the polarity of cells and halls, individuals and collectives, in order to open up new social, political, and mental horizons and to revive the architecture of dwelling as an art of making space.
The article uses various examples to show how the cave is constituted as the multifaceted Other of modern living and as its prehistoric predecessor. On the one hand, the article's focus is on supposedly natural caves, which primarily trigger Romanticism and its descendants as a counter-model to patterns of order in the history of ideas, discourse and politics. On the other hand, this article explores the projection of the cave onto modern living situations, which are attributed to the archaic as >> living caves <<. In any case, caves consist not only of rock formations, but also of multifaceted imaginations with which they have been enriched over the course of time and about which, not least, literary texts provide significant information.
This paper presents the cultural linguistic and contrastive HoWeKo project (Hochwertkonzepte - high value concepts) from the University of Sarajevo together with the research objective and method as well as the specially developed German-Bosnian Advertisements Corpus (GerBosAC corpus) and Advertis software. It also includes an illustration of the HoWeKo project by an example analysis presented in the third part. The general objective of the project is to describe the cultural specificity of core socio-cultural values in different language communities by means of linguistic analysis of their corresponding linguistic expressions in mass communication. The underlying conviction is that all linguistic expressions, especially individual lexemes, are necessarily culture-specific due to their different epistemic foundations in language communities, which is also true for the so-called internationalisms such as democracy or even such highest values as freedom. These core values are understood in this essay as high value concepts, meaning not only that they are accessible via the linguistic surface in the form of high value words, but also that quite different linguistic expressions can evoke the same high value concept. The correlation >> linguistic expression - high value concept - epistemic basis << is at the base of this. In the sense of frame semantics, insight can be gained into the culture-specific semantic filling or epistemic foundation of individual high value concepts, and a comparison between them reveals socio-cultural differences. The HoWeKo project, and thus this paper, is initially based on advertising texts from the GerBosAC corpus. After an introductory presentation of the corpus, the method and terminology and especially the concept of high value as a linguistic concept are illustrated, possible questions are discussed, and finally the first results are presented on the example of the high value concept social relation in German and Bosnian advertising texts. The initial results, presented in the final section of this paper, concern different types of social relations e.g. family, we-community or company-farmer/supplier. The third-mentioned one is verbally expressed - by partly varying means - as various purchase arguments in the respective language communities, showing some culturally significant differences in meaning.
This article questions the relevance of monofunctional housing concepts in light of ever-changing lifestyles and work patterns, as well as the urgent need to integrate nature as a social relationship into the understanding of dwelling. This article introduces an architectural-theoretical perspective on spatial indeterminacy and openness of use. The AI-based experiment presented here leverages the machine's lack of semantic understanding of functional spatial definitions to challenge fixed typologies and anthropocentric norms in architectural design, thereby dissolving outdated spatial concepts. In this purely formal architecture - detached from the rigid notions of predefined functions - the opportunity arises to fundamentally revisit one of the most pressing political questions of our time: How can we shape future ways of cohabitation while also including non-human actors in this expanded understanding of >> dwelling <
The article analyses the literary staging of the interior in Anke Stelling's novel Sch & auml;fchen im Trockenen against the background of intersectionality, precarious writing and working conditions and care work in literature. Complementary to interpretations of the novel that locate the asymmetrical dimension of the depicted housing conditions in the context of gentrification and homelessness, the reading examines the ambivalent coding of the interior: while the staging of the interior allows multiple vulnerabilities to become visible on different narrative levels, the protagonist's > writing chamber < functions as a resilient place that enables aesthetic production and social transformation in the medium of literary writing.
The article examines the mechanisms by which linguistic signs that serve to link parts of speech contribute to the poeticity of a text. Based on linguistic definitions of poeticity, the important role of aesthetic and semantic aspects for the creation of poetic effects is first clarified. In a further step, it is shown that linking signs with indeterminate semantics can also generate poeticity. The creation of poetic effects through linking signs is illustrated by analysing the functions of the connective und in poetic texts by Hans Arp.
The article deals with the multimodal practices of the linguistic representation of olfactory and gustatory perceptions in social interactions. The focus is on the verbal and multimodal strategies with which smelling and tasting are presented as subjective impressions in an understandable way for others. The analysis uses examples from video footage of professional tastings (wine, coffee, and chocolate) and reports on the loss of smell and taste in COVID-19 patients to illustrate how multisensory experiences are socially embedded and established as discursive knowledge. The aim is to understand the reading of physical perceptions as an intersubjective and culturally mediated process.
